In many work environments, online community environments, open source management projects and similar collaborative efforts, there are many participants that have only limited knowledge of and history with one another. In these environments, a great deal of information is exchanged through forums and email lists. It is difficult for participants in these collaborative efforts to determine the importance and accuracy of statements made by other participants, especially when there is contradictory information provided by different participants. For example, in on-line forums, there can be a large number of participants that each provide an opinion on a specific subject. It is difficult for the viewers of the forum to determine whether or not any given individual has expertise in the area of discussion. Similarly, it may useful to know whether a given participant providing information through such a forum has a good reputation with other participants or whether other participants have found the credibility of the specific participant providing the information to be lacking.
Some forums attempt to address this issue by tracking the number of posts that a particular participant has made. Also, similar statistics such as the date that the individual became part of a forum are tracked. Many forums provide a list of other posts made by a participant. Some users are designated as moderators or given similar titles and tasked to monitor the quality and appropriateness of discussions in the forum. Each of these tools or features is designed as a point of reference for participants in the forum to determine the credibility of a specific participant.
However, there are many ways that these tools fail to provide sufficient information for participants to make decisions about the credibility of any given participant. Many participants have insufficient time with a specific forum to build credibility. Although a specific participant may have other accounts in other forums or systems where the individual has built up credibility, that credibility is not transferable or knowable to the participants of other forums. For example, a participant in an open source debugging system may have one account for the debugging system, but have a separate account from other on-line forums. Thus, even if a participant utilizes a similar user name, avatar or personal identification in different accounts for forums or systems, it can be difficult to correlate the reputation or credibility of the participant across these systems. As a result, participants in each forum and project are ill-equipped to determine the credibility of any given contributor to a forum or project.